Path 2

Path 2

Fat Pants Fridays: Bee Desserts’ Honey Cake

March 19, 2010

For last week’s Fat Pants Friday, we ventured downtown to bask in the caramelized yellow glow of Locanda Verde’s banana tart. It was a decadent specimen fully worthy of the Fat Pants designation, but this week, feeling a bit full from several evenings’ worth of gastrointestinal exertion, we decided to celebrate the beginning of the weekend with something a wee bit more diminutive. Having heard promising things about Bee Desserts, a new-ish bakery and restaurant in the West Village, we headed there to try their signature honey cakes.

Bee Desserts' coconut corn cake

The $4 cakes, which are about the size of a Glade air freshener, come individually wrapped in gold foil, Willy Wonka-style. They’re enrobed by a thin shell of semi-sweet chocolate that’s embossed with an image of a honeybee and has an appealing, crackly delicacy. The cakes come in four different varieties — original, marshmallow, liquor, and almond — and are sweetened solely with honey (although one assumes that the marshmallow version uses actual sugar).

When broken in half, the cake (we tried the original) displays a golden-brown crumb so moist it could almost be used as a sponge. Neither the chocolate shell nor honeyed interior is overly sweet, but will stick to your fingers in an pleasing way, making you feel you’re consuming something much higher on the glycemic index. Because the cakes are both relatively light and palm-sized, they register at the lower end of the Fat Pants scale, rating a pair of skinny jeans. Unless, of course, you decide to scarf the whole product line in one go, which is tempting.

But if you’re really inclined to do some damage, you might instead try a slice of the bakery’s coconut corn cake. Sold in brownie-like squares, it displays both impressive density and fat and sugar content — it’s kind of like what would happen if a slice of cornbread spent some time in a dark room with a hunk of tres leches cake and a Mounds bar. Littered with fat curls of coconut and as incredibly moist as its honeyed counterparts, the cake all but weeps condensed milk from its yellow pores. Its taste wasn’t quite as inspired as the honey cake, but it certainly registers high on the Fat Pants scale, rating somewhere between sweat pants and burlap and a length of rope. And at $6.50, it’s an affordable way to celebrate dietary abandon and, of course, the advent of the weekend.